Ernie

Baidu’s new ERNIE-4.5 model rivals GPT and Gemini in multimodal AI, focusing on enterprise data, including visual formats like schematics and video. Its lightweight architecture activates only 3 billion parameters, reducing inference costs. ERNIE excels at interpreting non-textual data, solving complex visual problems, and automating tasks. Benchmarks show competitive performance in visual question answering. ERNIE aims to bridge the gap from perception to automation, enabling structured data extraction from visuals and integration with business systems, though substantial hardware is required. It’s available under the Apache 2.0 license.

Baidu is expected to launch its latest Ernie inference model by late August, reportedly surpassing OpenAI’s o3 in reasoning and computation. An updated Ernie foundational model is also planned. This occurs as OpenAI prepares to launch GPT-5, a unified, multi-modal system. Enhanced inference capabilities are becoming vital amid increasing competition in the AI landscape. Baidu, the first Chinese company with a ChatGPT-like chatbot, aims to compete with OpenAI and others by upgrading its models.